As a known conventional filling and packaging machine of this type, there is known a continuous rotary type filling and packaging machine provided with a container vertically adjusting device that vertically adjusts bottomed cylindrical container bodies made of synthetic resin, which are supplied in arbitrary orientations, such that upper end openings thereof face up and supplies the container bodies to a subsequent process, a filling device that fills a container supplied from the container vertically adjusting device with contents, a lid supplying device that covers the upper end opening of the container, which is filled with the contents, with a lid substantially C-shaped in cross section, and a sealing device that heats the lid and seals the upper end opening of the container with the lid (see for example, Patent Documents 1 and 2).
With a conventional continuous rotary type filling and packaging machine not including a measuring function in a filling head itself, a sufficient filling amount result with respect to a filling target value cannot be obtained. Even if products are measured after the end of filling and a defective product is detected, a filling head number cannot be identified among plural filling heads in a filling device from the defective product. As a result, all the filling heads in the filling device are inspected and a long inspection time is required. Besides the problem concerning a filling amount, in a mechanism without a self diagnosis function in a heating device in the case of occurrence of a seal failure (a mechanism that cannot measure a heating amount such as a high-frequency oscillator or a heat seal), similarly, when a seal failure occurs, a seal head number cannot be identified among plural seal heads in a sealing device and all the seal heads are checked.
As means for solving the problems in the continuous rotary type filling and packaging machine and the like, there is proposed a container extracting device that selects and extracts a processed container from a container processing line provided with a rotary type container processing device including plural processing heads, the device including recognizing means for recognizing by which processing head the processed container is processed, container discharging means for extracting a predetermined container, inspecting means provided between the container processing device and the container discharging means, printing means for printing, on the extracted container, information identifying the processing head that processes the container, and a control device provided with a shift register that shifts at a timing of the rotary type container processing device rotated at a predetermined angle, wherein, when the inspecting means detects a defective container, the control device writes, in the shift register, information identifying a processing head that processes the defective container and causes the shift register to shift the information and, at the time when the information is shifted to a position of the printing means on the shift register, instructs the printing means to print the information and, at the time when the information is shifted to a position equivalent to the container discharging means, instructs the container discharging means to discharge the container so as to enable identification of a rejected container and a sampling container without manual operation of writing information such as a head number (see for example, Patent Document 3).
However, a continuous rotary type filling and packaging machine having a production ability of 30,000 bottles or more per hour needs to accomplish high-speed and reliable sealing. A problem with a sealing device, especially an ultrasonic sealing device, is that even if a defective seal head can be identified, which part of a seal (horn) working surface in the seal head has a defect cannot be identified, and the seal head in which a seal failure is found must be removed from the sealing device and a cause of the failure must be separately examined. In most cases, it is inevitable to verify whether the defect of the seal (horn) working surface is recovered while the seal head is mounted on the sealing device.